If Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had done what the foreign diplomats in the UK were forecasting a few months ago, and nominated a member of his cabinet whose wife does not wear a veil, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) would now be enjoying a remarkable six-month window of political opportunity. With its man in the presidential palace, AK would have been able to use its huge parliamentary majority to pass almost any legislation it wanted.

Instead of which, just as the hot weather begins, Turkey's political parties, candidates, and voters, are cancelling their annual plans to spend the next few months in summer homes by the sea or on cool mountain pastures and the Pandora's box of political parties has popped wide open.

Though they have been pressing for early elections for months, the July 22 poll has taken the politicians by surprise. Space on advertising hoardings for the summer has already reportedly been sold out to commercial companies.

And no one is very hopeful about the elections unblocking the deadlock in national politics. As one Turkish journalist, Ertuğ Yaşar, points out, there could well be less rather than more deadlock. One likely scenario puts Mr Erdogan and his AK party back in power with a reduced majority. The other one, likely if there are four or five parties in the next parliament, is that it will have no overall majority. So Turkey would be back to coalition government again, probably a house of cards coalition against AK. Coalition governments in Turkey are by definition very weak because each coalition party and its ministries acts more or less independently of the others and every backbench MP knows the power of his vote to make or unmake the government.

Not very good at the best of times, but particularly unfortunate in a country that needs to elect a new head of state. Yesterday Abdullah Gül, the foreign minister, formallystepped down as candidate and the elections have been officially cancelled. AK party now hopes to change the constitution and hold direct popular elections for the president. It is questionable whether it can get the change into law either in this parliament or the next. Most Turkish politicians want a neutral and fairly weak head of state. Their difficult has always been finding one who was neutral enough - hence recurrent massive crises in past decades in the search for a president. A president with a majority of voters under his belt could hardly be just a figurehead, even if as AK seems to indicate, the president's existing powers to veto laws and make key appointments were reduced.

So is Turkey back to another decade of fractured party politics and their self-defeating infinite deviousness again? AK is still generally agreed to be the frontrunner in the elections. Its one-party government delivered nearly five years of stability and unprecedented prosperity. It will presumably reap a reward for that. But AK's roots were always in the religiously and socially conservative hinterland where, when you ask people what their politics are they tend to reply with just two words: "right" and "Islam". In the large cities, though AK controls the municipalities, it was always much less popular and not just with the middle classes. So AK's control over metropolises and Turkey's advanced western provinces may weaken in the coming elections. Elsewhere things may not change greatly. That would add up to more months of deadlock and rising frustration: a familiar pattern in the past and one which the politicians have been known to push to the point of breakdown.